Join the technological revolution that’s taking the financial world by storm. Mastering Bitcoin is your guide through the seemingly complex world of bitcoin, providing the knowledge you need to participate in the internet of money. Whether you’re building the next killer app, investing in a startup, or simply curious about the technology, this revised and expanded second edition provides essential detail to get you started.

Bitcoin, the first successful decentralized digital currency, is still in its early stages and yet it’s already spawned a multi-billion-dollar global economy open to anyone with the knowledge and passion to participate. Mastering Bitcoin provides the knowledge. You simply supply the passion.

The second edition includes:

A broad introduction of bitcoin and its underlying blockchain—ideal for non-technical users, investors, and business executives

An explanation of the technical foundations of bitcoin and cryptographic currencies for developers, engineers, and software and systems architects

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Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Andreas is a passionate technologist, who is well-versed in many technical subjects. He is a serial tech-entrepreneur, having launched businesses in London, New York, and California. He has earned degrees in Computer Science and Data Communications and Distributed Systems from UCL. With experience ranging from hardware and electronics to high level business and financial systems technology consulting and years as CTO/CIO/CSO in many companies — he combines authority and deep knowledge with an ability to make complex subjects easy to understand. More than 200 of his articles on security, cloud computing and data centers have been published in print and syndicated worldwide. His expertise includes Bitcoin, crypto-currencies, Information Security, Cryptography, Cloud Computing, Data Centers, Linux, Open Source and robotics software development. He also has been CISSP certified for 12 years.

As a bitcoin entrepreneur, Andreas has founded three bitcoin businesses and launched several community open-source projects. He often writes articles and blog posts on bitcoin, is a permanent host on Let’s Talk Bitcoin and prolific public speaker at technology events. Andreas serves on the advisory boards of several bitcoin startups.

I have very little experience with programming, and am only just getting interested in cryptocurrency, so I was somewhat nervous that this book would be too in depth, and too complicated for me to understand. Thankfully I was wrong. This book gives a great explanation as to how bitcoin works, which is something that is limited with other methods of learning about bitcoin. For most sources I read about bitcoin, they would only briefly cover the technical, leaving it ambiguous, as if transactions are just magic, and that we just accept that these happen. This book really shows how a transaction works, how blockchain works, and why we need it--along with a history and and thorough introduction of bitcoin that could explain it to someone that knows nothing of distributed ledger technology.

I would suggest this book for anyone technically minded that wants to take the deep dive into understanding blockchain technology.

While it did go above my head in many areas (as I was warned it would), it still was a great explanation on so many fronts of the whole bitcoin aspect. Highly recommend it to someone willing to mentally dig a little and challenge yourself.

This book goes into meticulous detail about how Bitcoin works at every level of analysis. It explains how keys work—even down to the level of the elliptic curve math—the ins and outs of transactions, and the components of Script, Bitcoin’s language for securing unspent transaction outputs (UTXO).

Andreas explains the Lightning Network, a beautiful second layer solution to achieving payments at scale. He also details how Segregated Witness solves the problem of transaction malleability while making transactions smaller and aligning fee incentives to reduce the UTXO set.

I appreciated all the real world examples that help anchor the discussion. Andreas never fails to impress!

Being a developer myself, I always favor books that have simple, straight to the point code examples. The hashing examples alone are a great source of for a developer to use in practicle applications, escpecially if one is trying to create block chain applications for a specific industry. Thanks for the deep read on this subject. I can't wait to see where the blockchain will be a few years from now.

Fantastic book if you want to learn what Bitcoin is and how it works. But when I say "learn", I mean LEARN it from technical perspective. It is very technical book, but so far - the best book on the market. Recommended!

This book has helped me a lot. Several years ago, I downloaded the 'asciidoc' version and compiled it, and I like this book so much, and have so much respect for how Andreas has represented bitcoin in general!